The Dream

I had a dream one night while I was in high school. In the dream, my dear friend died in a motorcycle accident. I woke up in the morning and I was still crying. My pillow was soaked with tears. The dream was so real I sat in bed that morning trying to figure out if he was really dead or not. It wasn’t until I was at school later in the day and I saw him in the flesh that I could relax and let go of the dream.

The dream made me painfully conscious that I was in love with him. He was a fabulous young man, intelligent and athletic and funny. But he liked girls. I had listened to him for hours while he mooned over girls in our class. I could never tell him the true nature of my affection. So I loved him in silence, and dreamed my tragedy in private.

As I reflected on this private, personal memory, I thought about all the high school students today who are secretly in love with someone of the same gender. One of the most important tasks of adolescence is learning to fall in love. And yet for gay and lesbian youth, there are very few safe places to talk about it. Should they go to a teacher or parent? And what if at 16 years of age, this young person gets rejected, ridiculed or kicked out of their home? Could any of us have survived that?

There’s been a lot of media attention to bullying in high school. I believe it is time for parents and teachers to do the hard work of creating safe places for coming out. That means teachers and administrators saying publicly ‘our gay and lesbian students have a right to fair and kind treatment by everyone’. What a world of difference that would have made for me and the tender sprigs of love that I was learning to nurture.

Skip

Some people say there is no love as pure and generous as the love between our dogs and us. When I first met Tom he was cohabiting with a dog named Skip, a terrier of mixed ancestry who Tom adopted from the humane society. Skip tipped the scales at 15 pounds and was just tall enough to scavenge for snacks left on the coffee table.

Skip wasn’t sure about me at first. I seemed to be moving in without spending that required time in the pound. He looked at me as if to ask, “Do you have all your shots?” When I sat next to Tom on the couch Skip would bare his teeth at me and growl… grrr. But with time and cookies and walks, we won each other over.

I disrupted their idyllic life when we moved to Ventura, then we moved to that awful little two bedroom apartment in San Diego, and finally to a home that was worthy of Skip’s lineage. By the time we moved downtown Skip was getting pretty old. Cataracts obstructed his eyesight; his gait was uneven and wobbly. But then I was in the early stages of MS so my gait wasn’t all that commendable. I had a walker and found that the easiest way for me to take him outside was to put him on the shelf in my walker and push him in front of me. After a while, he began to lose his orientation and just wandered around the apartment bumping into the walls like the pinball Wizard.

It was hard for us to know if he was suffering. It sometimes took him a long time to stand up. And he would stop and stare, for many minutes at a time, as if in a trance. Tom and I had long talks about Skip’s quality of life. He had been such a vivacious and adventurous little dog; the contrast with this lame, old Skip was disturbing.

We took him to the vet early one morning.The Doctor met us at the door and ushered us to an examining room. He was very kind and reassured us. “ It won’t take long and it won’t hurt him”. It was just one injection and his breathing stopped. The tears ran down our cheeks and we sobbed out loud. The vet left us alone in the room with Skip while we cried. We hugged him and kissed him goodbye and hugged each other. Is it their innocence and loyalty that makes their passing so painful?

We wrapped Skip in a big beach towel, and carried him out through the waiting room, now filled with people and their dogs, cats and birds. They all silently watched our solemn procession go by.

We placed Skip on the back seat of the Volvo and began our funeral cortege through the places he had lived and loved. San Diego, (Beverly Hills, he liked the window shopping there), Thousand Oaks, Ventura, Santa Barbara and finally back to the humane society, where he started.

A month later his ashes came back to us in a wooden box, and it sits now on a shelf in our home, next to his picture and some of his teeth. It remains a wonder to me that such a little fellow like Skip could have such a big heart, and could so effectively fool us. All the while we thought we were taking care of him he was actually taking care of us.

Barefoot In The Park

In 1969 I played the role of Paul in our high school production of ‘Barefoot in the Park’. This was one of Neil Simon’s most popular plays on Broadway with over 1000 performances in the 1960s. Mine was the role played by Robert Redford in New York and in the film. I didn’t look like Robert Redford, but never mind- no pressure. It is a very funny script and we had a lot of fun keeping them rolling in the aisles.

Playing opposite me in the role once played by Jane Fonda, was a lovely high school senior girl named Kevin Crooks. She was terrific. And the script called for us to kiss each other at several points in the play…on the lips. I was a high school sophomore. Tall for my age but in most ways not experienced at all. You get my drift? The only women I ever kissed were my mom and grandmothers, and that was not the kind of kissing the script called for. When it came time for our characters to kiss, Kevin was very patient. She tutored me to kiss like a real heterosexual. (I suppose it helped that her name was Kevin, I could just close my eyes and imagine kissing anyone I’d like; Kevin Costner, Kevin Bacon-you get the idea.)

The play was set in New York City in the 60s so of course there were jokes in the script about gay people. I knew what gay people were, kind of. But they were mostly the butt of jokes even to Neil Simon.

The real balm that the play provided was the laughter. It was the first comedy in which I had acted. And I was surprised by how luxurious it felt to be the recipient of all that laughter. It billowed up from the audience and rolled over me. As long as they kept laughing I could do no wrong. You can be sure that Neil Simon is a genius when he puts words in the mouth of a high school sophomore and makes people laugh for hours.